The patient presents with severe heart failure.

The left ventricle of his heart is only pumping out about 25 percent of the blood within it, compared to the healthy 55 to 70 percent. He has nearly 20 times the amount of a certain peptide used to measure heart function. He is nearly deaf and blind. His thyroid gland is sluggish, the lymph nodes near his left hip are swollen and he has a fever.

What’s wrong with him?

Enter Dr. House, of the television show “House.” In an episode, a patient presented with similar issues. The German doctors who examined our real-life patient remembered the episode — and remembered the culprit in the fictional case. Metal poisoning, specifically cobalt poisoning from the character’s artificial metal hip. In the real-life case, the doctors tested the patient’s cobalt levels. They were 1,000 times higher than normal. Chromium levels were 100 times higher, and the patient’s urine tested high for both metals. The German doctors published their study in a recent issue of the medical journal Lancet.

Oddly, the condition is called “Quebec beer drinkers’ cardiomyopathy.”

The story behind this name is potentially the most interesting aspect of this medical reality show. Over a period of eight months, from August 1965 to April 1966, 50 beer drinkers came down with this condition. These were heavy beer drinkers, quaffing 24 pints a day of a particular beer: the Dow Ale, from the local Dow Brewery. Turns out, the company had added cobalt sulfate to the ale as a foam stabilizing agent — poisoning the beer drinkers in the process. Twenty of the men died of the metal poisoning.

Our poisoned patient? His damaged artificial hip was removed. Though his hearing and vision were still impaired 14 months later, the rate at which his heart pumped blood rose to about 40 percent.

Dr. House would be proud.